Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

There is a viral video making its way across social media this week that every Democrat who cares about the future of the party should be required to watch. It runs about three minutes. It is not comfortable viewing. In it, Scott Wiener — California state senator, frontrunner for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, gay Jewish progressive with one of the most consequential LGBTQ legislative records...

This is another in my occasional series on the pediatric trans industry. Imagine a 14-year-old walks into a therapist’s office and announces she has bipolar disorder. She read about it online, she says. The symptoms match. She wants an antipsychotic prescription medication. No competent therapist anywhere would write the prescription. The therapist would do what therapists are trained to do, explo...

There are moments in a long-running public scandal when history seems to write the coda itself. Last week, while much of the national press barely noticed, Joss Sackler, wife of former Purdue Pharma board member David Sackler, appeared in federal court in Miami and pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation. She admitted deleting WhatsApp messages that would have shown she wa...

This week a syndicated newspaper columnist wrote about one of our upcoming book projects, AI: An Autobiography, and treated it as what it is: a bold, strange, funny, unsettling experiment in letting a machine narrate its own life. At the very same time, Lois Whitman, the New York-Miami PR strategist who is leading the push to spotlight project, is hearing something very different in private from e...

What matters most at this moment is not the specific contents of the Epstein files, but the political and cultural momentum driving their release. I’ve spent years battling governments and institutions for transparency: the JFK and MLK assassination records, Argentina’s Nazi fugitive documents, the Vatican Bank’s World War II archives. One truth emerges every time: the harder governments fight to...

University presidents last week finally said aloud what many Americans suspected: the pro-Palestinian uprisings that swept across campuses after Hamas’s October 7 attack were not spontaneous acts of youthful conscience but were well-coordinated and funded. “It’s more than a social contagion,” said Vanderbilt’s chancellor. “They’re organized networks as well.” Syracuse’s chancellor went further: “I...

Last week’s headline that President Trump asked Billy Long to resign—making him the seventh IRS commissioner to leave this year—masked a much deeper crisis. The Internal Revenue Service is facing its worst operational breakdown in modern history just as it must implement one of the most sweeping tax code overhauls in a generation. Charged with collecting $5 trillion a year, the agency has endured...

In 1933, the Third Reich passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases—a chilling attempt to control who was allowed to be born, rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of “racial purity” and Aryan superiority. Nazi medical schools taught students to worship genetic “perfection,” and had the tools of today’s genetic science existed then, it’s not hard to imagine how ruthlessl...

The United States is home to just 5% of the world’s population—but we generate 75% of global pharmaceutical profits . That imbalance was at the heart of my Oxford Union debate last week. Now, there's a fresh example of how drug companies wring outsized returns from the U.S. market. Gilead Sciences, a California biotech giant, is best known for Truvada, its HIV prevention drug (PrEP), which brought...

My take on the enduring seductive power of conspiracies Get full access to Just the Facts with Gerald Posner at www.justthefacts.media/subscribe

Many people think I am a conspiracy debunker since I concluded in Case Closed , my 1993 reexamination of the JFK assassination, that Oswald alone had killed the president. Not quite. Not all conspiracy theories are equal. Although they have been around for millennia, just in my lifetime I have witnessed the unraveling of consequential conspiracies that exposed government lies about Vietnam, the po...

My latest WSJ OpEd went live this evening online and will be in the print edition tomorrow. Here it is in full for Just the Facts subscribers (note: The VoiceOver for this article is an AI automated voice) Protecting women’s sports should be at the top of the Trump administration’s to-do list. The issue gained national attention in 2022, when male swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been ranked 65th among...

The brutal murder of UnitedHealth Group CEO, Brian Thompson, in the streets of Manhattan, has elicited widespread condemnation but also unleashed an online tsunami of celebratory memes and praise for the killer. The polarizing reaction has put a spotlight on the deep-seated animosity that many Americans harbor toward health insurance companies that often deny critical medical claims to protect pro...

Meta has kept secret a disturbing flaw in its systems by which cybercriminals exploit Instagram accounts for illegal activities, including running up charges on stolen credit cards and selling nonexistent products. The criminals exploit a weakness in Meta security by creating and linking fraudulent Instagram accounts to randomly selected legitimate Facebook profiles. This enables the hackers to mo...

The World Bank somehow lost track of upwards of $41 billion to fight climate change, about 40% of all its climate funding over the past seven years. The stunning disclosure was made public last week following an audit by Oxfam, the left-leaning British NGO focused on fighting worldwide poverty. The amount of missing money “could be twice or 10 times more,” according to a World Bank insider who ask...

A whistleblower leaked to The Free Press an audio tape of a CBS news editorial meeting on Monday, October 7, in which senior executive Adrienne Roark admonished the CBS Mornings cohost, Tony Dokoupil, for his interview the previous week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his just published book, The Message . This episode should send shivers down the spine of every serious journalist. As Bari Weis...

It did not take very long for conspiracy theories to start about why Trump had a bad debate night. One pro-Trump Twitter account with half a million followers posted last night, “It appears Kamala Harris was being coached by using earphones embedded in her earrings during the ABC presidential debate against President Trump.” Another pro-Trump X account posted that claim while the debate was underw...

The Washington Post published an article today by Kyle Melnick about Trump’s promise to release all the JFK assassination files and what those documents might disclose. It is thorough old-fashioned journalism, one of most balanced and informative pieces about the JFK files from a mainstream outlet this year. Melnick sets out the facts and includes interviews with me and Jefferson Morley, the edito...

Many of our subscribers are familiar with yesterday’s disastrous landmark court ruling in Australia that women’s only spaces must admit men who identify as women. “[I]n its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable” concluded the trial judge, and “sex is not confined to being a biological concept.” This was a test case for whether women would remain a protected sex class. The answer is no....

[This post will be familiar to those on Twitter, where I have posted much of the below in a couple of long tweets that kicked off a lot of debate. At least it is getting people thinking about the consequences of what many at first think is a virtuous policy] My ‘shame of the week’ award goes to Wes Streeting, the UK Health Secretary. He said this past Wednesday that people who are racist to NHS st...

This 10 minute attached video covers the issues I raised the other day in my article “ A Dereliction of Duty? Problems in the Trump Shooting Deadline. ” Smerconish lays out in the first half the latest information about the security lapses that preceded the shooting. Then we talk about what I conclude is “the greatest breach and dropping of the ball in terms of Secret Service security that I’ve ev...

[Updates to this article are in double brackets, dated and in bold]. The VoiceOver for this article is only the original July 16 post] I wrote on X a couple of days ago decrying the rush to conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. “How about waiting for the facts to emerge?” I asked. “There is a story behind the Trump assassination. I just don't know what it is yet.”...

[Sorry for a second Just the Facts on the same day. Long time subscribers know my regular pace is a new piece every couple of weeks or so. Below is a reprint of my Wall Street Journal OpEd. It is online now for those who have a WSJ account and want to comment there. It will be in the paper tomorrow] Incendiary political language has consequences. Donald Trump ’s claims that the 2020 election was s...

Take your pick of suspects. The Deep State, Jews, the Democratic Party, Islamists, Israel, maybe Putin? How about it was staged? Since I wrote Case Closed 31 years ago about the JFK assassination, I have been asked hundreds of times in interviews about whether the Kennedy conspiracies would have started quicker and been more florid had there been an internet and social media. I always said yes. Th...

Everybody gives lip service to free speech. Until it runs counter to what they believe. It is not easy nowadays to have a reasonable discussion about topics such as gender ideology or the effect of the T on LGB without some zealots making life miserable for those with whom they disagree. Debate often quickly devolves into a verbal food fight. No wonder so many of the smartest people I know stay aw...